The same stages as my life

My poetry has passed through the same stages as my life; from a solitary childhood and an adolescence cornered in distant, isolated countries, I set out to make myself a part of the great human multitude. My life matured, and that is all. It was in the style of the last century for poets to be tormented melancholiacs. But there can be poets who know life, who know its problems, and who survive by crossing through the currents. And who pass through sadness to plenitude.

Pablo Neruda em entrevista à Paris Review.

António Lobo Antunes

Em entrevista à Paris Review.

The idea of the poem

Christopher Logue em entrevista

It is the idea of the poem that has inspired me. I always read Chapman and Pope, just to see what as poets they did. Pope was the last poet to translate the Iliad into English verse. I look at new translations as they come out, that of Professors Knox and Fagels, for example, which is a touch sharper than Professor Lattimore’s. However, these three professors may have been reading Homer all their lives, but he’s failed to teach them what verse is. They do not write verse. They write blank-verse prose, sired by E. V. Rieu, via Lang, Leaf, and Myers out of the King James Bible. It burbles along but it doesn’t scan. Still, such things make a bomb for the publishers. Those who aspire to poetical know-how usually buy Lattimore or a Rieu-type Homer. I have never seen any evidence that any of them get past the introductions. But the professors love it. They are the translation police. It is easy to see why: it keeps Homer in their hands. If they had to teach Homer via Chapman or Pope or even Logue, they would have to teach Chapman and Pope and Logue. And that is, quite frankly, just asking too much. Heterodidacts are like that. Critically-minded scholars, such as Jasper Griffin, M. S. Silk, Charles Beye, W. A. Camps and Malcolm Willcock tell me much more than such translators.

...

So much of the poetry that is published and praised today seems to be the work of self-indulgent windbags, people who imagine that self-expression is a justification for writing. It is easier to become the president of the United States than a good poet. Any poet writing in English is expected to produce striking phrases, quotable lines, memorable passages, and just plainly beautiful things. And this the minimum.

Auden, Entrevista à Paris Review, 1972

Entrevistador: Do you have any aids for inspiration?
Auden: I never write when I’m drunk.
(...)
Entrevistador: Have you read, or tried to read, Finnegans Wake?
Auden: I’m not very good on Joyce. Obviously he’s a very great genius—but his work is simply too long.

Gamado daqui.

Caryatids

Sylvia and I met because she was curious about my group of friends at university and I was curious about her. I was working in London but I used to go back up to Cambridge at weekends. Half a dozen or so of us made a poetic gang. Our main cooperative activity was drinking in the Anchor and our main common interest, apart from fellow feeling and mutual attraction, was Irish, Scottish, and Welsh traditional songs—folk songs and broadsheet ballads. We sang a lot. Recorded folk songs were rare in those days. Our poetic interests were more mutually understood than talked about. But we did print a broadsheet of literary comment. In one issue, one of our group, our Welshman, Dan Huws, demolished a poem that Sylvia had published, “Caryatids.”

Ted Hughes, in Paris Review, n.º 134, Primavera de 1995.

Herbert segundo Herling

Herbert was more or less my contemporary, though he’s dead now. He was writing as a poet during the Communist regime in Poland. He was not only a great and esteemed poet, but a fierce anti-Communist. He didn’t make concessions; he had no use for Ketman and so forth—so relations between Herbert and Milosz were always rather cool. He was one of the few writers in Poland who was, shall we say, Conradian in his refusal to compromise with the regime. He was a very great poet. As much as I like Szymborska personally—she’s an extremely nice woman—I was very sorry that she, rather than Herbert, got the Nobel prize.

Gustav Herling, in Paris Review, n.º156, Outono de 2000

Ted Hughes (III)

There is a sense in which every poem that comes off is a description or a dramatization of its own creation. Within the poem, I sometimes think, is all the evidence you need for explaining how the poem came to be and why it is as it is. Then again, every poem that works is like a metaphor of the whole mind writing, the solution of all the oppositions and imbalances going on at that time. When the mind finds the balance of all those things and projects it, that’s a poem. It’s a kind of hologram of the mental condition at that moment, which then immediately changes and moves on to some other sort of balance and rearrangement. What counts is that it be a symbol of that momentary wholeness. That’s how I see it.
*
After university I lived in London, did various jobs, but I was removed from friends and from constant Beethoven, and for the first time in years I thought about nothing but the poem I was trying to write. Then one night up came “The Thought Fox” and, soon after, the other pieces I mentioned. But I had less a sense of bursting out, I think, more a sense of tuning in to my own transmission. Tuning out the influences, the static and interference. I didn’t get there by explosives. My whole understanding of it was that I could get it only by concentration.

Ted Hughes, in Paris Review, n.º 134, Primavera de 1995.

Ted Hughes (II)

Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps it’s the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic—makes it poetry. The writer daren’t actually put it into words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies. We think we’re writing something to amuse, but we’re actually saying something we desperately need to share. The real mystery is this strange need. Why can’t we just hide it and shut up? Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to confess? Maybe if you don’t have that secret confession, you don’t have a poem—don’t even have a story. Don’t have a writer. If most poetry doesn’t seem to be in any sense confessional, it’s because the strategy of concealment, of obliquity, can be so compulsive that it’s almost entirely successful. The smuggling analogy is loaded with interesting cargo that seems to be there for its own sake—subject matter of general interest—but at the bottom of Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, for instance, Milton tells us what nearly got him executed. The novelty of some of Robert Lowell’s most affecting pieces in Life Studies, some of Anne Sexton’s poems, and some of Sylvia’s was the way they tried to throw off that luggage, the deliberate way they stripped off the veiling analogies. Sylvia went furthest in the sense that her secret was most dangerous to her. She desperately needed to reveal it. You can’t overestimate her compulsion to write like that. She had to write those things—even against her most vital interests. She died before she knew what The Bell Jar and the Ariel poems were going to do to her life, but she had to get them out.

Ted Hughes, in Paris Review, n.º 134, Primavera de 1995.

Why madness sometimes works

I’ve sometimes wondered if it wouldn’t be a good idea to write under a few pseudonyms. Keep several quite different lines of writing going. Like Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet who tried four different poetic personalities. They all worked simultaneously. He simply lived with the four. What does Eliot say? “Dance, dance, / Like a dancing bear, / Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape, / To find expression.” It’s certainly limiting to confine your writing to one public persona, because the moment you publish your own name you lose freedom. It’s like being in a close-knit family. The moment you do anything new, the whole family jumps on it, comments, teases, advises against, does everything to make you self-conscious. There’s a unanimous reaction to keep you as you were. You’d suppose any writer worth his salt could be bold and fearless and not give a damn. But in fact very few can. We’re at the mercy of the groups that shaped our early days. We’re so helplessly social—like cells in an organ. Maybe that’s why madness sometimes works—it knocks out the oversensitive connection. And maybe that’s why exile is good.

Ted Hughes, in Paris Review, n.º 134, Primavera de 1995

Sem casaco, no ar de jasmim/ perco-me caminhando no entardecer/ respirando - ambicioso e vencido a ponto/ de não existir

Ouve.

Pequenas bibliotecas e livrarias em Boston capazes de vender um punhado de poetas como Laforgue

No, Babbitt would be the last person! The one poem that Babbitt always held up for admiration was Gray's Elegy. And that's a fine poem but I think this shows certain limitations on Babbitt's part, God bless him. I have advertised my source, I think; it's Arthur Symons's book on French poetry*, which I came across in the Harvard Union. In those days the Harvard Union was a meeting place for any undergraduate who chose to belong to it. They had a very nice little library, like the libraries in many Harvard houses now. I liked his quotations and I went to a foreign bookshop somewhere in Boston (I've forgotten the name and I don't know whether it still exists) which specialized in French and German and other foreign books and found Laforgue, and other poets. I can't imagine why that bookshop should have had a few poets like Laforgue in stock. Goodness knows how long they'd had them or whether there were any other demands for them.